


Feel it here, the silence

by SmilinStar



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-19
Updated: 2014-04-19
Packaged: 2018-01-20 00:51:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1490632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SmilinStar/pseuds/SmilinStar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>God, she's beautiful. And the thought makes him physically ache.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Feel it here, the silence

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the Dishwalla song When Morning Comes. Apologies for the angst. I feel Episode 1x17 killed my propensity for fluff.

\-----

 

It's just a cacophony of noise, senseless and disorientating.

 

She feels like she's being tethered only by a single rope, frayed at the edges, ready to snap and let her float away into the ether at any second.

 

It doesn't even hurt where it's supposed to.

 

All she feels is a heaviness in her chest, sinking through her and settling in the pit of her stomach. The ache gnaws at her ceaselessly and she blames the rivulets of tears streaming down her face on her heart shattering to a million, useless pieces.

 

The bullet lodged in her chest has nothing to do with it.

 

“Hold on Jemma, you're gonna be okay. You're gonna be fine, I promise.”

 

Oh Fitz. Wonderful, dependable Fitz.

 

It was a shame he was so bad at enthusing optimism.

 

Where she had always been sunshine and eternal hope, head in the clouds, his feet had always been planted firmly on the ground. The realism to counter her unfettered dreaming. A perfect pair.

 

“I couldn't . . . I couldn't get,” she struggles with the words and they sound horribly gargled.

 

The taste. The horrible metallic taste and all she can smell now is blood. There was so much blood.

 

“Shh, Jemma, shh it's okay.”

 

There's a hand on her head, smoothing away her hair from her forehead. She thinks she hears tears in his voice, and she wants so badly to reach out and touch something real.

 

He seems to read her thoughts and finds her fingers in his warm grasp.

 

It's the anchor she needs and her clogged up haze of thoughts overhead suddenly dissipates long enough for her to reach out and grab hold of just one-

 

“Skye!” she says with a rising panic, flooding up her lungs and making it difficult to breathe.

 

“Jemma, _Jemma,”_ Fitz repeats, raising his voice and trying to get through her building hysteria, “Skye's okay. She's going to be fine. You did it.”

 

She thinks its relief that lets the last batch of tears slip out from her heavy eyelids. She thinks its okay to let them close now, and hopes the smile on her face is one of serenity only and that it gives her dear old friend some peace.

 

“Good, that's good,” she whispers.

 

She doesn't hear him yelling. Frantic shouts to _stay awake,_ and strained prayers of _please, please, please,_ and perhaps it's small mercies she doesn't hear him plead, most heartbreakingly of all, _please don't leave me._

 

No, she hears nothing but laughter and the rush of air as she _falls, falls, falls_

 

Into a blissful nothing.

 

\-----

 

Time isn't really very kind to him.

 

Sure, he's still that same handsome man, who had once cockily claimed to be everyone's type. He can still turn on the charm with a well practised smile, he just has extra creases at the corners of his eyes to mark the passage of time when he does, is all.

 

No, it's not that. It's the bitterness that seeps from his eyes when he does. The same bitterness that flows through his veins, sluggish and with no real purpose. Thoughts that fuel the idea that if it ever stopped flowing it wouldn't be of any real loss. No one would notice a thing.

 

Time has carved away at his soul, and left only a hollow imprint in the sand. Once washed away by the tide, no one would remember it ever being there in the first place.

 

It's almost six and a half years to the day.

 

Six and a half years, and he thinks maybe finally, _finally,_ it's time.

 

“You look like you've seen a ghost,” she says.

 

He smiles, but it looks oh so wrong, like it doesn't quite fit on his face.

 

“That's because I have.”

 

“Are you quite certain?”

 

Even as a figment of his imagination, she still has that same refined British accent, a tone that invites challenge, one he was always so powerless to resist.

 

“Absolutely.”

 

She steps closer, and he thinks there's a smile playing on her lips.

 

God, she's beautiful.

 

And the thought makes him physically ache.

 

“I shot you.”

 

“You did.”

 

She's dressed in black and there's a small part of him that thinks it's wrong and it doesn't sit right in his stomach. But there's the other part, the part that thinks it almost apt. Almost poetic.

 

His very own Angel of Death.

 

“You're dead,” he whispers.

 

“Am I?” she asks.

 

She's even closer now, and he thinks he can see her just that little bit more clearly.

 

And he's wrong. She's not smiling at all.

 

There are tears on her cheeks, catching the light and making them sparkle as if she were crying diamonds. But the image is jarred by darkness, by glimpses of blackness, damp and cold, and the glint of dull metal, shaped like a gun in her trembling hands.

 

He feels the stickiness that has his shirt clinging to his chest, warm and flowing.

 

Red. It's red.

 

“I shot you,” he says again.

 

“You missed.”

 

“I never miss.”

 

And there's a truth in that that startles him.

 

He never misses.

 

And then he knows. He finally knows.

 

For the first time in his life he knows what it means to be at peace.

 

He thinks he feels the ghost of her touch, a soft caress across his cheek as his eyes drift close. The smile is back on his lips and it’s no longer wrong.

 

Her lips brush over his and whisper the words, “I'll see you on the other side.”

 

“Make it years.”

 

She smiles against his skin and he takes it as her promise.

 

Just as he makes his, “I'll catch you when you fall.”

 

 

\-----

 

It's three weeks later when she hears the news.

 

Agent Grant Ward of HYDRA, aged 37, had been caught in the crossfire between S.H.I.E.L.D. and HYDRA agents as they had fought to take back control of the newly re-built Triskelion. He had taken a single shot to the heart. The bullet, fatal.

 

She feels the teams' eyes on her when Coulson breaks it to them.

 

She doesn't cry.

 

Simply walks out and away from their much too concerned, and sympathetic glances.

 

In the privacy of her own room, she allows herself a moment to crumble.

 

She never really got it till now as she lets her finger reach up under her shirt and circle the small scar left on her chest, right next to her heart.

 

She remembers them saying,

 

_Lucky._

 

She had been lucky.

 

A centimetre more to the left and she would have died on the spot, there and then.

 

She thinks luck never really had a thing to do with it.

 

 

  **End.**

 


End file.
